the house at the end of the world
by DirigibleBoyKing
Summary: God turns out the lights and leaves twenty-six trees, a sliver of ocean, seventeen stars, two humans, an angel, and a tiny stone house on a spur of rock. Implied Sam/Dean.
**i.**

When the world ends, it happens very quietly.

In a fraction of a second, everything ceases. Humans mid-word, mid-kiss, mid-prayer, machinery grinding, animals tearing into one another, the dance of stars and planets- they simply End. Time's delicate, corrupted gears are smashed. Concepts, ideas, creations cease to exist; story after story is hushed from the universe. Heaven crumples like the petals of an orchid. Hell expires, blowing raspberries. Streetlamps wink out. Stars close their eyes. The world's last breath is a silent one, and then it's unmade; unravelled like a ball of scarlet yarn.

All except for twenty-six trees, a sliver of ocean, seventeen stars, two humans, an angel, and a tiny stone house on a spur of rock.

Oh, and a car.

 **ii.**

They go to sleep in a motel room in Illinois, and wake on the cold floor of a cottage.

Castiel opens his eyes first, and he knows. He senses the terrible emptiness that lies beyond their tiny island of being and immediately he is outside the house, standing on the very edge of what was once a cliff face and is now simply a rock, a rock with the ocean lying darkly beneath it. And as he looks out he sees the bloodstained horizon of one last and final sunset, light flashing off still water, and as Sam and Dean come to stand at his side they stare, awed, as the sun goes down forever.

'Oh, God,' says Sam. It's not inaccurate.

Golden light pools as it vanishes, like a great ship sinking beneath the water, and Castiel knows: they are the last beings that will ever see this. And perhaps Dean knows too, because he does not blink as he gazes out, eyes reverent and lost, and perhaps Sam knows the most of all, because his forehead crunches up and he turns his back upon the sunset.

And then it's gone, and they're left in darkness.

But Castiel has not seen this darkness for- a long time. This is the darkness of wild things. A hungry hush that eats up stars and voids and angels, a darkness that Castiel barely remembers from the very beginning of his existence, when the world was still raw and unfinished. This darkness is a lullaby and a death-knell, and although it hovers all around them it does not encroach upon them. Their little spur of land remains untouched. There is a great blackness all around, relieved only by the faint light of a few stars, and the brothers are silent within it. Castiel brings forth a light, a globe of Grace that curls in his palm like a maggot.

Sam and Dean are standing, hands fisted in each other's jackets. They look shaken.

'Cas,' says Dean, 'tell me you know what the fuck just happened.'

'I believe the world may have ended,' says Castiel, and he flies to the very edge of what remains of the universe, reaching as far as he possibly can, and looks around. He's among trees, but he can sense the house and the Winchesters still; they're perhaps eight hundred feet away.

He turns his back upon where the house is and walks forward, pushing at the boundaries of the world. Emerging from the trees, he enters the darkness beyond.

Castiel walks for what seems a long time within it. Of course, the darkness has no colour, though sometimes he senses nameless mutations moving within it; he is careful to stay away from them. He is not sure why he is here. There is nowhere to go; only this strange lack of incident, this all-consuming thing that could dance on the head of a pin, this headless snake that's swallowed everything, everything there is, his home and his kin and his all. All except-

And he is back on the rock, tie askew, sweat beading on his skin. He staggers, and a hand catches his elbow; Dean, stoic. Castiel is very old, and Dean is thirty-nine, but sometimes his steadiness, his safeness, makes him forget that. For the barest moment.

'Everyone alright?' Dean says. By the fierce light of Grace, the Winchesters look hunted. The whites of Dean's eyes gleam as he looks at Sam, whose hand is still clutching Dean's sleeve.

'I'm fine,' says Castiel. 'Sam?'

Sam, who is never _fine_ and rarely so much as _okay_ , responds by sinking to one knee and retching painfully onto the stone. Every one of Dean's movements takes on purpose, and as Dean smooths Sam's hair back from his forehead Castiel enters the house.

It's small, and yet it feels- full. Dusty and womblike. There are apple-green shutters on the windows, the colour faded to something lovely. If he looks out of its windows, he can almost pretend that this is a true night-sky; a few stars remain, after all, and he imagines they will be a great comfort to the boys. He can feel the imprints of other lives; fleeting touches against his form as if from trailing cobwebs. There are creatures still living here. Mice and spiders- tiny beings. Perhaps his Father wished them to have company.

And there are things still here. Belongings. Beloved things. In what he assumes was once a living-room stands a piano; the keys are out of tune and jangle strangely, and the wood is a peeling pale-blue. There's an old cabinet, and the lock opens to Castiel like a flower. Inside is cracked china, plates all patterned with owls. The kitchen table is milky,a knot of darker wood splitting it like lightning, and the chairs mismatched- a piano stool, a rocking-chair that Dean will no doubt deem _fucking scary, man, that thing is going over the cliff_ , a high-backed armchair with the temporary look of a stage prop.

Three chairs. Trees and sea and stars.

Upstairs are two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a loft. The loft is full of books. He turns a few over: old James Bond paperbacks, what is surely everything Stephen King ever wrote, scattered volumes of Edgar Allen Poe. Blake, Salinger, P.R James. A battered pile of Harry Potters, and he wonders if those will make Sam feel any better; they spent a raucous night last month with the human trying, over his own and Dean's laughter, to explain the plot to Castiel. He isn't sure he fully understands it yet, but he's willing to accept what they have told him.

There's a double bed with a flowered duvet in one of the rooms, and old pictures piled up against the wall. He goes to turn them over, and his heart catches. They're ocean scenes, wild and crashing and wonderful, but the canvases are slashed as if someone's taken a knife to them. Castiel has been among humans for almost a decade, but the ruining of beautiful things will never stop being unfathomable to him. He sees a similar look in Sam's eyes, sometimes, if Sam is looking at a child popping soap bubbles, or someone picking wildflowers. A sort of bewilderment. Perhaps it's common amongst creatures who've spent thousands of years elsewhere.

Inexplicably upset, he sets the pictures back against the wall and leaves the room.

The second room is tiny, containing nothing but a neatly-made bed and a battered gramophone sitting beside it, as if the room's last occupant liked to listen late at night, and Castiel settles onto the bed. The cotton is soft with age. He watches the splay of his tendons as he flattens his hands upon it, fingers spreading like wings.

 **iii.**

They settle. Like dust motes blown up only to fall again, they settle.

He's surprised when it isn't Dean but Sam who has the most difficulty adjusting. Castiel would have thought Dean, with road-dust in his hair and eyelids heavy with bar-grease, tapping his foot to the rattle of his car, would be the one to get cagey. He always associated Dean with sunlight glancing off car windows, with the rough safety of the road. With freedom, perhaps. And he cannot help but wonder- if Sam was not so clearly fracturing to peices, would this break Dean for a final time?

Taking care of people, Castiel realises, is what Dean does to keep himself going. He's wary of liking that trait too much.

Yet seeing Dean amongst this great sobbing silence is not as strange as he would have thought. He hadn't noticed how quiet Dean could be before now; sometimes it's the quiet of running wolves, and sometimes it's the quiet of content things. In these moments he stokes the fire they keep in the grate, and sometimes he goes and sits on the little stone step of their house and gazes out at that deep deep dark.

At the seventeen stars.

None of them need to eat anymore, it would seem, but they do so anyway because Dean likes cooking. Just like the stock of wood in the outhouse, the supply of canned food and flour and oil and biscuits in the pantry never seems to go down (Cas is a little afraid to check this theory, just in case it stops working). Sleep isn't necessary either, but Sam always tries because he goes a little mad when he can't sleep, as they discovered one day by means of a box-cutter and a locked door. They stop ageing- he senses it- but it doesn't remove the grey that had already begun to speckle Dean's hair, or prevent him from swearing up a storm about his bad knee. Sam threw his back out last October ( _the_ last October) and it's never been the same since.

He still gets migraines, too.

'Perhaps God left them in for _authenticity_ ,' says Dean savagely to Castiel as he rifles through drawers looking for Tylenol, and Cas doesn't reply.

In the beginning, Sam had refused to get out of bed. He and Dean had taken the room with the slashed paintings- now hidden in the loft, from which the books have been distributed round the house. Time did not exist, now- now all they had was beginning after beginning, now every clock in the house was stuck on twelve-past one (except for the cuckoo clock in Castiel's room, which had been on a quarter to four for roughly half a century). And so Sam lay with his hair curled against the pillow and eyelashes shadowing his cheekbones, and he made no sound.

'I feel like he's waitin' for something,' Dean had confessed to Cas, soon after this began.

'Perhaps,' Cas had said, and together they'd looked down the corridor to the open door through which a pale, long-boned hand could be seen hanging off the bed, fingers curled like dead ferns.

It takes a while- maybe hours, maybe centuries- before Sam moves. Dean tells Cas later that he was just sitting on the windowsill when a hand fastened round his wrist, and he'd looked down to see the strangest look in Sam's suddenly-open eyes; an incansdescent resolve, as if he dreamed awake. Or, as Dean had called it, Sam's shiny Jesus face.

It's another while- the sun never rises, so they don't know how long- before Sam speaks, and the first word out of his mouth is _mouse_.

They're sitting in the kitchen, fire crackling to keep the darkness out, Dean bustling around in a _kiss the cook_ apron making something that smells of thyme and vaguely scorched meat. Sam is cross-legged on their ratty Persian rug, head tipped back onto the edge of an armchair, the arms of which Cas is lying sideways over. They're all growing, tentatively, more tactile.

Sam's eyes focus on a spot on the floor in front of him, and, very softly, he says, 'Mouse.'

Castiel stiffens and looks down. Dean almost drops his spatula.

Sam's being literal; there's a mouse on his ankle. A brown creature the size of Castiel's thumbnail, woffling a tiny pink nose at him. It's the first living thing they've seen in ages that isn't each other, and Dean makes a noise of disbelief as it runs up Sam's extended palm, up his sleeve, and Sam chuckles a little when it's out of sight. His eyes flick up to Dean's, and the brothers are looking each other in that way Castiel's noted- with something huge and bright and lovely behind their eyes.

Huge and soft and golden-holy.

 **iv**.

So Sam and Dean fall in love with each other, and Castiel falls in love with the ocean.

It happens like this: he misses Heaven. Of course he missed Heaven before- that place of screaming curling weeping glory, that place of fruitfulness- but it was still _there_. Still extant in its infected majesty, however corrupt; still the home of all things.

And now the world is empty of that furled purple wound, hived like a secret behind the moon, and Castiel reaches into emptiness. That nook behind his skull is bare of the whispers of his brothers and sisters, once as steady as breath. He thinks that the three of them could count every living thing left on their combined fingers. Castiel had never been so aware of the hugeness of his Father's previous creation until he could see all over its remnants when he sat on their roof.

He misses Hell, too, in an obscure sort of way. He hasn't shared this with Sam and Dean, of course, but it feels strange not to have something to disdain. Now, the ocean- the splinter of it that they have left- is all that feels truly real to him. And so he finds a fishing-rod and he sits at the tip of their spur of rod and he fishes. At night, and at night, and at starlit night, for now dawn will never come.

And the house is strangling him.

Their ocean is not always still and black as glass under the stars. Sometimes God sends them a breeze, a breeze that ruffles Castiel's feathers in musical, unnerving sobs, and when this happens Sam and Dean emerge from the house or the trees and stand, slender and fierce as candle-flames, star-silvered eyes turned to the heavens.

When this happens Castiel feels his Grace stir and grow within him, stooping and straightening and rising like a fountain to the back of his throat in a joyous ache. And then will his wings break from his shoulders and rise and sweep and arch and proclaim, light bursting from them to pale their sky with submarine radiance, and then their sapling Earth will bow in homage and trees will wail and stars burst like streetlamps and thunder roll in a battle-cry. And Castiel, towering, glorious, roars with the face of a wolf.

When this happens Castiel is seraphim; mostly, though, he is content to fish.

 **v**.

As with most things, Dean threatens the rocking-chair for a while before taking it unto his bosom.

'That thing is fugly, man,' he says. 'Can't we just toss it over the cliff?'

And Sam looks at him and says 'No, Dean, we can't, because we have three goddamned chairs in this goddamned house and _that is the only goddamned one you will sit in_.'

When he's not with Dean, Sam spends his time in the forest; he takes a torch and reads amongst the rustling leaves. On Castiel's few forays there, he has seen that the trees are all ancient, huge and gnarled and as thick as ten men, their trunks bulging and undulating and knotted. Sam seems to find them comforting. The forest has a quiet rich as soil. Sam speaks more now, though none of them are as talkative as before; there is less need for noise, and most things are communicated through a hand on a shoulder, a touch to the hair, a squeeze of the wrist. Castiel comes to like his small room with its view of the sea and the deep dark sky, and Sam gives him books to read; he peruses murder mysteries, working his way through Agatha Christie and L. Sayers and Conan Doyle. He feels as if he is in a waking dream, and so do Sam and Dean. Their disbelief reflects in all their facets- Sam's enquiring softness, and the wall of _I don't deserve_ this that plugs up Dean's brain.

He can hear them, sometimes. The sounds that come from the room of the slashed paintings (which they took back out of the loft and hung upon the walls; they have come to see the loveliness in them). Tender sounds. The brothers sleep pale and sprawled. Occasionally Castiel stands at the foot of their bed to watch the rise and fall of ribs, the way their skeletons shine beneath lunar flesh. The hollows and avenues of entwined souls.

 **vi**.

Sam returns from the trees with a wisp of wonder in his eyes. He tells Dean that he saw a milk-white stag there, and Dean does not become worried and careful as he might have once. Instead he pulls Sam's head forward and kisses him.

The brothers go together amongst those great silent tree-beings, and when they return they are rapt.

'You got no idea, Cas,' Dean says, soft. 'It was- I've never seen anythin' like it. Just this stag, just like Sam said, and this great big silver bear walkin' along beside it. I mean, they didn't even look corporeal, not completely.'

'A bit here,' Sam says. 'A bit somewhere else, y'know? But I- I couldn't forget that. Not even if I wanted to. It was- Cas, it was _holy_.'

Sam's eyes are wet and shining. Castiel considers telling them, considers saying _it was yourselves you saw in those woods_. Considers saying _little bits of you peeled away every time you said goodbye to each other, and now they've come back to you_. Considers saying _it was your missing pieces you saw in those woods_.

But he only smiles, and Dean is grinning like a child, and Sam shines deep and shy back at him, and he thinks that there's a word for this, if he could only recall it, a deeply deeply human word. A nice word.

Happiness.

 **vii**.

They take on a kind of beauty, the three of them. Beautiful like plastic bags floating on the wind, like ghosts caught on film, like seaglass. Something raw, macabre, silvery. Something unearthly.

Sam and Dean slip out of their skins sometimes without noticing, and the woods are haunted by the stag and the bear, and sometimes on windy nights, when Castiel is fishing in the ocean and throwing back all his catches, he hears the music-breath of angels on the breeze- and turns-

And there it is, straightening up above the trees, throwing back its luminous head and howling in triumph, lightning erupting where its wings touch each end of the universe, all teeth and tongues and eyes in the palms of its hands and shining and shining and shining.

And they live.


End file.
